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The poppadom’s revenge

We came, we saw, we stacked poppadoms. The Scope Poppadom Challenge 2006 was a nail biting experience, but in the end the best team won (that’s us, by the way).

Published on October 17th 2006.

Chris Akabusi would have been proud. After the injustice that we suffered at last year’s farcical event, Manchester Confidential stormed to an amazing victory on Friday to win the Scope Poppadom Challenge 2006, and stack our way into the Guinness Book of World Records.

The event, in which teams competed against eachother to build the tallest ever tower of poppadoms, was organised to raise money for disability charity Scope as part of their Curry Week. I must shamefully admit though, that charity was the last thing on our minds as we psyched ourselves up to compete for the coveted place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The plan had been originally to have a professional architect on our team, from Manchester architecture firm Shepherd Gilmour. But at the last moment we discovered that the treacherous architect had set up his own team with some architect friends, and were going to be going head to head with us. Things were starting to get dirty.

For 45 minutes, the Manchester Confidential team battled against our Shepherd Gilmour rivals as we stacked poppadom upon poppadom in front of a crowd of spectators and Manchester’s press.

Shepherd Gilmour were looking like the clear favourites as we approached the halfway stage, with their neatly ordered tower putting our beast of a construction to shame. But then, as we neared the 45 minute deadline things started to turn and the architects’ tower began to look a little unstable.

As the ten second countdown began, the architects - taking one look at our magnificent structure - began to panic and attempted to beat us by towering a huge stack of poppadoms on top of their already fragile tower. Inevitably, their greedy ambition was rewarded with destruction and, like the Tower of Babel their ambitious tower came crashing to the ground, scattering poppadoms all over Albert Square.

Our tower on the other hand, stood proudly in the sun at a magnificent 54 inches, and didn’t crumble until Andy dived onto it in an excited stupor – obviously only after the official Guinness Word Records invigilator had measured it.

So well done us, heartfelt commiserations to the architects, and thank you to Scope (www.scope.co.uk) for organising yet another fantastic event. See you all next year!